Ubuntu 8.04 is planned to have usability improvements for Wine, among these improvements is a theme for Wine applications that matches the GTK theme. Can’t wait until April?

The simplest way to theme Wine is to use the registry to change the colour scheme. Observe the difference between default Wine 0.9.46 and Wine with a Human colour scheme:

Much better! You can install this colour scheme by pasting the contents of this text file into your ~/.wine/user.reg file.

A colour scheme is nice, but the widgets are still plain squares. It’s possible to get a look like this:

However, in the current Wine versions full theming is too slow to be usable. (You can watch it draw individual lines in slow motion.) If the Wine developers fix this in time for Ubuntu 8.04, a matching Wine theme will be used by default.

Still want to try it out anyways? Download the theme, extract the folder, and run winecfg. Go to the Desktop Integration tab and click Install theme. Load the msstyles file, and select Clearlooks in the Theme drop down box. If it’s so slow with the theme on that you can’t even turn it off, you can disable the theme by removing your ~/.wine/user.reg file.

Have any tips for improving the appearance of Wine applications with Linux? Leave a comment below.

I wouldn’t recommend using the Clearlooks theme. E.g. a softwae installation that usually takes like 2 minutes will take an hour with the theme loaded. Must be some bug with the handling of progress bars. Everything else seems to be fine, but whenever there is a progressbar it will start from the beginning over and over.

Have any tips for improving the appearance of Wine applications with Linux? Leave a comment below.

I think that at the hearth of wine there is the will to run something totally alien for a linux box. So wine is a great linux app, that can surely be more integrated with the rest of the environment; but wine apps are basically WINDOWS apps, so we would need an “human/clearlooks theme for windows” to install in wine, to let win apps look “”like”" (double quoting needed) linux ones.

[...] The windows of the application are a little ugly, particularly compared to native Linux applications. This also is a known issue and is an issue with Wine itself. It would appear there are plans to fix this is future releases of Wine and Ubuntu. [...]

I pasted the color scheme info into ~/.wine/user.reg per the instructions. It worked great, and wine is now much easier on the eyes. I did not try the second step and go for the full theme. I figure I can wait for the next version of Ubuntu for that. There is no need to risk slowing things down when the color scheme solves 90% of the ugly issue.

Wow. Very, very nice. WINE put out another update today; I have them in my apt sources so I’m expecting it to show up in my tray within the next 24 hours. This is all so very exciting. Leaps and bounds of progress everywhere.

I only hope Ubuntu Hardy uses a less ugly theme. I hate colors with lower frequencies than green.
Color wheel based theming would be nice too.– like WMP and Live messenger, but system wide.
…I’d put this in ideapool, but my account seems to be broken.

[...] windows, but wouldn’t it be nice if they actually meshed with your Linux desktop? The Tombuntu blog shows you how, from a simple text file copy to more extensive (and memory-eating) tweaks (Original [...]

dannybuntu, its because wine doesn’t smooth/antialias the fonts like the rest of the desktop does. something they should add though, though the theming engine is still a little buggy. one thing at a time, right?